25/05/2010 (The Borneo Post), Kota Kinabalu - Palm oil stands out as the only edible oil certified voluntary, through the Roundtable On Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) principles and criteria, said Plantation Industries and Commodities Minister, Tan Sri Bernard Dompok.

“Efforts are currently underway to involve Malaysia’s smallholders and bring them into the certification fold,” he said, in obvious reference to the European Union’s (EU) insistence on certification of palm oil, produced from plantations and mills that implement sustainable practices.

Speaking at the Second International Palm Oil Sustainability Conference (IPOSC 2010) here, Dompok said the world today has a fair and substantial quantity of RSPO certified and sustainable palm oil from producer nations, including Malaysia.

The industry had anticipated strong demand and premium for certified sustainable palm oil (CSPO), especially from global multinational food producers.

“However, it is sad to note that the uptake of CSPO has been extremely slow,” he said, adding that end-users in importing countries, who earlier desired certified palm oil, were now unwilling to pay a small premium for it.

The EU wants Malaysia and Indonesia, the world’s top producers, to supply sustainable palm oil, claiming that the opening of oil palm estates was destroying the environment by increasing gas emission and the orang utan’s natural habitat.

Some groups even claim, biodiesel derived from palm oil, is not clean fuel.

The RSPO, an international organisation formed in 2004 to help improve sustainability practices in the production of palm oil worldwide, formulated principles and criteria, upon which certification of palm oil is carried out.

To prove Malaysian palm oil’s sustainability, producers willingly volunteered to agree to RSPO’s vetting process in order to be certified.

The world’s first certificate for sustainable palm oil was awarded to Perak-based United Plantations Bhd in 2008.

In the pursuit of sustainable development, Dompok also said Malaysia had initiated studies on the life cycle assessment of palm oil.

“The outcome of the study will allow us to identify carbon emission in the life cycle of palm oil and institute measures to mitigate these effects,” he added.

He also gave an assurance that the development of the industry was being chartered along a sustainable basis.

According to Dompok, the days of palm oil being labelled as unhealthy was over, as the edible oil has been proven to be nutritious and wholesome.

Malaysia and Indonesia, account for 90 per cent of the world is palm oil output and Europe, lately, emerged as one of the major markets for the commodity apart from China and India.